News

The Robert Giard Foundation, in partnership with The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at City University of New York, is proud to announce the 2012 Robert Giard Fellowship recipient, filmmaker Cary T. Cronenwett.

Cronenwett receives The Robert Giard Fellowship grant of $7,500 for post-production on Go With Flo, a 20­‐minute personal essay film centered on Cronenwett’s relationship with close friend and creative partner Flo McGarrell.

“A non­‐traditional love story, Go With Flo tells the story of Flo’s life-­long exploration of his transgender identity through his creative work,” says Cary Cronenwett. “The Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship will enable me to complete post‐production on Go With Flo to be released alongside Kathy Goes to Haiti, our final film together.” Cronenwett and McGarrell first collaborated together on Maggots and Men, a homoerotic film about idealistic revolutionary soldiers. Upon completion of Maggots and Men, McGarrell relocated to Haiti to lead the prestigious Fondation Sant D'A Jakmel (FOSAJ) Art Center in Jacmel. There, Cronenwett and McGarrell worked together on the short film Kathy Goes to Haiti. Less than three weeks after wrapping production, McGarrell died in the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

“Cary is a fascinating and articulate man with a great passion for his work,” says Carl Sylvestre, president of The Robert Giard Foundation. “We were impressed by his thoughtful, process‐oriented approach to making Go With Flo, and are eager to support his work with the largest fellowship devoted to art centered on human sexuality, gender, and issues of LGBTQ identity.”

Cronenwett joins a select and distinguished group of Robert Giard Fellows including: filmmaker Yoruba Richen (2011) for The New Black, a documentary on the fraught relationship between the black Christian church and the gay rights movement; Molly Landreth and Amelia Tovey (2010) for the national self-­portrait video/photography archive project Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America, viewable at embodimentusa.com; and inaugural Robert Giard Fellow Sonali Gulati (2009) for her documentary film I AM, in which Gulati traveled across India to meet with and interview parents of other gay and lesbian south Asians.